When Daru and his younger brother, acting under Carnot, then Minister of War, had organised the memorable Italian campaign of 1800, and had themselves been ordered to Italy, they sent for Beyle to come to them there, though they had for the moment no definite appointment to offer him. The youth of seventeen, who was by nature as energetic as he was imaginative, and whose dreams were all of daring deeds and the First Consul, did not wait to be called twice. He packed a dozen standard works in his knapsack and started for Geneva; there, though he had never learned to ride, he mounted a horse which Daru had left behind ill, but which had recovered, and, encountering many difficulties, rode over the Saint Bernard on the 22nd of May, two days after Napoleon. On the 1st or 2nd of June he reached Milan, the city where he was to have his first experience of the joy of life, and which was always to loom largely on his mental horizon. He witnessed the outburst of rapturous joy with which the abolition of the hated supremacy of Austria was hailed, and on the 4th of July was present at the battle of Marengo. After holding an appointment in the commissariat for some months, he entered the seventh regiment of dragoons as sergeant (as we are reminded in a curious note to the fifth chapter of _Rouge et Noir_) was promoted to a lieutenancy at Romanego, and was shortly afterwards made adjutant to General Michaud. He distinguished himself in all the subsequent engagements, and especially at Castel-Franco, not only by courage; but by the ardour, accuracy, and intelligence with which he executed all the tasks entrusted to him. We have, evidently, a very exact account of young Beyle's feelings as a spectator of the battle of Marengo, in the description of Fabrice del Dongo's youthfully enthusiastic and heroic emotions as spectator of the battle of Waterloo, a description which undoubtedly owes much of its masterliness to its being a faithful reproduction of personal experiences. The period which begins with the youth's ride across the Alps and ends with his farewell to the army after the Peace of Amiens, was the period of his life to which Beyle looked back as that of perfect happiness; it was rich in every variety of romantic experience; during it he did daring deeds, fought a comical duel, had various youthful love affairs, and enjoyed the poetry of a soldier's life in a beautiful country, where the foreign conquerors were greeted as saviours and heroes by a careless, naïvely passionate people, who were prevented by no scruples from indulging their thirst for pleasure.